The problem is both global and national: urbanisation and increasing car use mean that pollution is on the rise internationally, while the UK government is under huge pressure to clean up air that has broken EU legal limits for the past eight years. Western capitals do not feature in the WHO’s lists of the planet’s most polluted cities, and levels of most pollutants in the UK have fallen (though not ammonia, a byproduct of farming). But increased scientific understanding of the damage to health caused by gases such as nitrogen oxides makes inexcusable the complacency of which we have seen so much, both under the current Conservative government and its coalition predecessor.

It is imperative that we move beyond this stand-off. Recent history shows that when well-evidenced public health measures deliver benefits in improved safety and wellbeing, people accept them with little fuss. The 11-year-old ban on smoking in public places and 35-year-old law making seatbelts compulsory are good examples. While many people are against new rules in principle, trained as they have been by the rightwing press and politicians to be suspicious of the “nanny state”, when it comes to individual measures – such as manufacturers being obliged to tell them how much sugar is in their food – they are much more receptive.

Individual responsibility has a role to play in all this. Those of us who are able to should think about our choices to drive, walk, cycle, or use a wood-burning stove, just as we should be aware of what we eat and drink. But ministers’ relentless emphasis on personal choice and behaviour in recent years, combined with the arrival of genetic tests and activity trackers such as Fitbits, have occluded those areas of life in which, really, the individual is not the point. Air quality and the closely related question of urban transport is one of these areas. In July the family of nine-year-old Londoner Ella Kissi-Debrah applied to reopen an inquest into her death, with expert evidence that air pollution may have caused the asthma attack that killed her. Such tragic cases illuminate the extent to which already vulnerable people are the victims of the current inaction. Politicians at all levels must stop ducking and diving and take the measures that are necessary to protect the public’s health.